Follow-up to What Ever Happened to Modernism?, part 1: Shakespeare, Federici, & the devaluation of women

My focus may be shifting somewhat here, but I'm by no means done with literature or blogging about literary matters. Indeed, before moving on, I have some unfinished business to attend to regarding What Ever Happened to Modernism? As long as my essay about that book was, still I had to leave certain topics more or less unaddressed, or less fully explored than I had originally intended. (Isn't it remarkable what we think of as long anymore? As if the essay is anywhere near as long as a full-length essay we'd have read easily prior to the advent of blogs. Fact is, I'm just an amazingly slow writer, so the thing felt interminable. But I digress, even more pointlessly than usual.)

First, having re-read the post a few times, I now wish I had indeed written more about the historical "responses of artists to [the] situation" described by Silvia Federici (for those keeping score at home, I'm referring to the second block quote from Federici in that post, the one that ends with the reference to Rabelais), especially the stuff on Shakespeare I'd ambitiously hoped to include. The title to Federici's Caliban and the Witch, after all, is an explicit reference to The Tempest, a play which is also invoked by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their excellent book, The Many-Headed Hydra, in the opening chapter about the wreck of the Sea-Venture in 1609. They write:

The wreck of the Sea-Venture and the dramas of rebellion that played out among the shipwrecked suggest the major themes of early Atlantic history. These events do not make for a story of English maritime greatness and glory, nor for a tale of the heroic struggle for religious freedom, though sailors and religious radicals both had essential roles. This is, rather, a story about the origins of capitalism and colonization, about world trade and the building of empires. It is also, necessarily, a story about the uprooting and movement of peoples, the making and the transatlantic deployment of "hands". It is a story about exploitation and resistance to exploitation, about how the "sappe of bodies" would be spent. It is a sotry about cooperation among different kinds of people for contrasting purposes of profit and survival. And it is a story about alternative ways of living, and about the official use of violence and terror to deter or destroy them, to overcome popular attachments to "liberty and the fullness of sensuality".

We are by no means the first to find heroic significance in the story of the Sea-Venture. One of the first—and certainly the most influential—was William Shakespeare, who drew upon firsthand accounts of the wreck in 1610-11 as he wrote his play The Tempest. Shakespeare had long studied the accounts of explorers, traders, and colonizers who were aggressively linking the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through world trade. Moreover, he knew such men personally, and even depended on them for his livelihood. Like many of his patrons and benefactors, such as the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare himself invested in the Virginia Company, the spearhead of English colonization. His play both described and promoted the rising interest of England's ruling class in the settlement and exploitation of the New World.

No doubt I would have skillfully summarized this material and artfully incorporated it into the essay. Anyway, my point here is not to damn Shakespeare by aligning him with the powerful, but to merely remind us that he was a real person with real interests, living in a specific time and place. In any event, while The Tempest may have "promoted the rising interest of England's ruling class", and indeed Shakespeare's own interests as an investor, the figure of Caliban has long served as a symbol for Latin American rebellion and resistance to colonization. Meanwhile, the figure of Caliban's mother, Sycorax, "the witch", has remained invisible, both in the play and to the revolutionary imagination, Federici says. In Caliban and the Witch, then, Federici places her "at the center-stage, as the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt."

Federici invokes Shakespeare again, in passing, in an extended exploration of the degradation of women that accompanied the transformation of the working class over the course of the 15th to 17th centuries, as part of a process through which women became defined as "non-workers", where any work they did out of the home was now called "housekeeping", and as such devalued, and "[m]arriage was now seen as a woman's true career":

This was for women a historic defeat. With their expulsion from the crafts and the devaluation of reproductive labor poverty became feminized, and to enforce men's "primary appropriation" of women's labor, a new patriarchal order was constructed, reducing women to a double dependence: on employers and on men. The fact that unequal power relations between women and men existed even prior to the advent of capitalism, as did a discriminating sexual division of labor, does not detract from this assessment. For in pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.

Perhaps you can begin to see why I decided not to include this material. Just too much background to cover in order to get to what is really a supplementary point in the course of a review. (There's nothing stopping me here though!) Federici goes on to discuss changes in the family, which

began to separate from the public sphere and acquire its modern connotations as the main centre for the reproduction of the work-force.

The counterpart of the market, the instrument for the privatization of social relations and, above all, for the propagation of capitalist discipline and patriarchal rule, the family emerges in the period of primitive accumulation also as the most important institution for the appropriation and concealment of women's labor.

With these shifts in society, "the insubordination of women and the methods by which they could be 'tamed' were among the main themes in the literature and social policy of the 'transition'." With respect to social relations, "throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, women lost ground in every area of social life" including "a steady erosion of women's rights". Women were attacked and vilified in the popular and intellectual literature of the period:

Women were accused of being unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful. Especially blamed was the female tongue, seen as an instrument of insubordination. But the main female villain was the disobedient wife, who, together with the "scold," the "witch," and the "whore" was the favorite target of dramatists, popular writers, and moralists. In this sense, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1593) was the manifesto of the age. The punishment of female insubordination to patriarchal authority was called for and celebrated in countless misogynist plays and tracts. English literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period feasted on such themes. Typical of this genre is John Ford's 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore (1633) which ends with the didactic assassination, execution and murder of three of the four female characters. Other classic works concerned with the disciplining of women are John Swetman's (1633) which ends with the didactic assassination, execution and murder of three of the Arraignment of Lewed, Idle, Forward, Inconstant Women (1615); and The Parliament of Women (1646), a satire primarily addressed against middle class women, which portrays them as busy making laws in order to gain supremacy over their husbands. Meanwhile, new laws and new forms of torture were introduced to control women's behavior in and out of the home, confirming that the literary denigration of women expressed a precise political project aiming to strip them of any autonomy and social power. In the Europe of the Age of Reason, the women accused of being scolds were muzzled like dogs and paraded in the streets; prostitutes were whipped, or caged and subjected to fake drownings, while capital punishment was established for women convicted of adultery.

No doubt most of this literary output was dreck; it's Shakespeare we remember. It's interesting, though, that it's his play that is dubbed by Federici a "manifesto for the age". Certainly the title seems capable of naming the age and what happened in it. But my admittedly hazy memory of the play has it as rather more playful and ironic about the "taming" attempted and (in the play) provisionally achieved. Perhaps this is one measure of Shakespeare's comparative "responsibility" as an artist? I'm reminded of a passage from Josipovici's chapter on Shakespeare in On Trust. He writes:

Where Marlowe had embraced the new powers given him by the Elizabethan state by placing on that stage men whose power over both their fellows and the audience depended on their rhetoric, men with whom we feel Marlowe the playwright identifies, Shakespeare, more realistic, more responsible, made his plays out of the recognition of the ambiguous nature of play. Marlowe, like Verdi, exults in the ability of the protagonist, through his voice, his speech, his song, to transcend reality, to give body to our desires, and we love him for it and pay to be thus transported. Shakespeare, like Mozart, never forgets the limits of that power as well as its dangerous ambiguity.

I was reminded of this passage, it's true, but I also had it readily to hand, since I've had it sitting in a draft post for, literally, more than three years, where I'd also stashed this sentence from “What was Chaucer really up to?”, a review by Josipovici of several Chaucer-related books, which is collected in The Mirror of Criticism:

The responsible artist is the one who is aware of the inevitable failure of all language, its narrow ideological base, and who uses his art to bring this out in the open.

The responsible artist. More responsible. I had had some notion, three years ago, of meditating on this idea, exploring its implications in the context of what we mean by the aesthetic, and by political or didactic art. (Perhaps Joanna Russ can help me here. But more on her later.) I didn't get far with it at all. Since that time, I've written a fair amount about the need to situate an artist within his or her political time and place, including the review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? itself ("Literature is not Innocent", I also blogged). But the question of what it means for the artist to be responsible, which may not resemble calls for what the artist should do, has eluded me. Perhaps, though I remain uncomfortable claiming that artists should be expected to do any given thing, it feels accurate to say that a responsible artist manages to avoid merely transmitting (or endorsing) the dominant ideologies of his or her situation, though it seems unavoidable that those will be reflected in the work, in some way. This ambivalence, however slight, perhaps, allows the work to become available to readers or viewers from outside that situation. Shakespeare's Caliban is able to find his audience. Which is probably a good place to end this post. Further examination of the responsibility of the artist will have to wait for another post. As will further follow-ups to the Josipovici review (which follow-ups should actually be more clearly literary in nature than this one ended up being).

Structuring Metaphors

Last week Mark Thwaite had an excellent post touching on, among other things, David Shields' Reality Hunger (a book which sounds wildly unappealing to me; see also Stephen Mitchelmore's post on that book), Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (about which I still have a few things in the works), Derrida, Marx, Hamlet, etc. Mark writes:

We read Spectres of Marx and note that 'Hamlet' allows Derrida to think, and to think of Marx. 'Hamlet' supplies him with the metaphors that allow him to unpack Marx's own metaphors and allow us to see how these metaphors structure Marx, structure 'Hamlet' and could deconstruct (unstructure) our idea both of Marxism and the destructive reality of our capitalist present.

And in a recent post at American Leftist about the recent split in the British Socialist Workers Party, Richard Estes comments on the differences between anarchists and Marxist-Leninists, and says:

One anarchist novelist recently said, I distrust any activists who don't read fiction. The remark struck a nerve with me, because I have had a similar experience with political activists generally, that the ones who were disinterested in various forms of cultural expression, like theatre, film and literature, were the most rigid and intolerant. There is a relativism in such creations that enhances one's perception of the world and one's place in it.

Marrying these two paragraphs together, the experience of art reorients us towards the world, and one could say that imaginative literature, fiction, helps us to think about "the destructive reality of our capitalist present" whether or not it thinks it's explicitly about that, whether or not the writer is apparently on the "right" side. That, indeed, the relativism in such creations can help us to unpack and to structure reality, to work through the metaphors necessary to a political understanding of reality.

A world about to be lost

The following is from the opening chapter of Gabriel Josipovici's The Book of God: A Response to the Bible:

. . . once Luther stood up and asserted the need to speak the truth as he saw it and not pay lip-service to tradition, things could never be quite the same again. We tend to see Luther's break with the medieval church, like Spinoza's with Jewish tradition, as the triumph of light and integrity over the forces of obscurantism and hypocrisy; but this is to see it from their own point of view. It is important, however, to grasp what gets lost as well as what is won in such revolutions. . .

What does get lost? Might it be worth trying to regain some of what was lost in our inexorable march forward?

Chapter four of Josipovici’s On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion is titled "Shakespeare: trust and suspicion at play". The chapter opens with a passage from Act I, Scene iii, of Richard II—two men are preparing to duel, each intending to prove with their lives that the other is "A traitor to his God, his king, and him". Richard intercedes and prevents the duel from occurring. Josipovici’s argument here is that Richard's action "opens the way for the flowering of Shakespeare’s mature art". As part of this argument, Josipovici doubles back to Scene i, in which another duel is in the offing. In these opening scenes, Shakespeare is, Josipovici suggests, "presenting us with a world which is just about to be lost, a world in which we can trust because inner and outer are intimately related, and God still speaks directly to us, as he did to Abraham and Moses, and as Achilles' mother did to him."

Josipovici employs the work of Peter Brown to illustrate this "world which is just about to be lost". The duel ("trial by combat") is, in effect, a variation on the trial by ordeal, in the sense that guilt or innocence is determined through the body. The ordeal strikes us as barbaric. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the ordeal is often used to represent the barbarity and the irrationality of the Middle Ages, indeed to often stand in for the totality. Josipovici quotes Brown on a shift "from consensus to authority" that was occurring in the 12th century. This shift

was bound up in the shift in the relations between inner and outer, subjectivity and objectivity; for the supernatural, 'which had tended to be treated as the main source of the objectified values of the group, came to be regarded as the preserve . . . of intensely personal feeling'. It led too to the growth of rationality, 'for appeal to reason in clerical controversy invariably implied . . . that men could be expected to obey rapid and trenchant decisions--the outcome of syllogisms, the production of an authoritative written text'.

In the play, Richard puts a halt to the duel. We don't have any definitive reason why he does this, but "the simple fact is . . . that by his intervention he reveals his own fatal lack of trust in the process that tradition has ordained." We might look on this and see this as incontestably good: the duel is a ridiculous way to solve problems, and Richard was right to put a stop to it. But, Josipovici notes, as the play continues, Richard exercises his authority in an increasingly arbitrary manner. As he does so, he reveals himself to be "at odds with the workings of nature". Where once his name meant something when invoked, now, since he's essentially scuttled the tradition on which such an invocation relied, his power becomes ever more arbitrary, his name meaningless, just another word: "in a world shorn of consensus and the acceptance of tradition, a name is a word like any other".

As mentioned, Josipovici draws from Peter Brown, on the shift away from consensus (as represented by the ordeal, or duel) toward authority. Again, to us, the matter seems straightforward. The ordeal is symbolic of the kind of irrational "justice" resorted to in the dark days before laws and constitutions and basic civil rights for individuals. And the idea that the supernatural was seen as "the main source of objectified values of the group" is exactly the kind of thing that we are happy to be rid of today. For, let's face it, it's not like there actually was any supernatural from which such "objectified values" could be derived. It was superstition and nothing more. (It's not as if God actually spoke "directly to us, as he did to Abraham and Moses, and as Achilles' mother did to him." That's just literature and religion.) We can talk all we want about how Richard's abandonment of tradition (perhaps because he'd lost faith in it himself) led to his increasingly arbitrary rule, but isn't the ordeal--the duel--just as arbitrary?

Josipovici doesn't spend a lot of time on this (just enough to illuminate his point about Shakespeare and Richard II), but, already interested in elements of tradition that have been lost, I was intrigued enough to seek out Brown myself. The work in question is an essay called "Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change", which is collected in his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. In Brown's discussion, the ordeal emerges as far more complicated than our modern imagination generally allows for. We imagine a form of mob justice in which, almost tautologically, physical evidence of the body proves the case (e.g., a man weighted down will sink, thus proving guilt); we associate it with witch-hunts. But there appears to have been much more to it than that. Brown describes various different kinds of trial by ordeal and the detailed preparation undertaken beforehand (which often took weeks). He talks about several recorded instances in which the participant of an ordeal had the option to back out. The point here is that the ordeal was a process through which the community set a matter to rest. And it appears to have been a process that was understood and in which the community placed its collective trust. We think of it in terms of a superstitious belief that God would intervene and protect the innocent, that it is God who judges in this sense. But this isn't quite right either. According to Brown (as referenced by Josipovici--I had to return Brown's book to the library and so must rely on the second-hand quotation here):

. . . it is important to understand that 'it is not a judgement by God; it is a remitting of a case ad iudicium Dei, "to the judgement of God"'. Thus, 'by being brought to the judgement of God, the case already stepped outside the pressures of human interest, and so its resolution can be devoid of much of the odium of human responsibility'.

This might sound like so much splitting of hairs to us. And how exactly is it a good thing that "human responsibility" is removed from the equation? I think that good or bad in our present-day senses are not really relevant when trying to understand something like this. In fact, I'd say that they get in the way of understanding. What seems to matter here is that this was a process that the community trusted in. The removal of human responsibility, in this sense, ends the conflict. The idea is that bad blood is avoided.

What was happening in the Middle Ages that might have caused this shift away from consensus? Brown talks about increased centralization and about clerical reformers concerned with law; as part of this tendency, there was the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (which, among other things, proscribed clergy from any involvement in trials by ordeal, and also more clearly defined the sacraments). These are among the many signposts--including Spinoza and Luther, mentioned above--on the way towards modern conceptions of the individual. Am I trying to argue that we would be better off returning to the use of trials by ordeal? Hardly. And yet it seems to me that something of value was lost along the way. In this case, the sense of trust that communities had in the process might be one thing. The shift from communal justice, to which, in theory at least, everyone agreed, to a more centralized, dispensed justice must have been incredibly confusing. Elsewhere in his essay, Brown writes that "[t]he shift from consensus to authority is one of the most subtle shifts of all in the twelfth century. Is, perhaps, the greatest single precondition for the growth of rationality." And: "In a sense, the exercise of reason, as fostered by the intellectuals and the reformers of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, was the most blatant exercise of authority of all."

It is arguably ironic that the imposition of authority--hierarchy--leads to the growth of rationality. In the United States, we have a written constitution, we have laws, we have contracts (and we have a system of rights). We have highly organized, extremely hierarchical institutions. We have massive corporations unaccountable to any public. Does any of this not seem arbitrary? (A topic for future posts.)

What does all this have to do with Shakespeare? One of the things that appeals to me in Josipovici's criticism is the fact that the problems he identifies and explores so brilliantly in literature, are related to problems in life. In his Introduction to On Trust, he describes what he means by a "craft tradition". Let me quote from it at length:

A craft implies a tradition into which you are inducted by a master; in which you serve your apprenticeship; and in which you in turn become a master. It implies that what you are doing when you practise your craft is, if not necessary to society, at least sanctioned by society. Weaving carpets if you are a female member of a nomadic tribe in Eastern Turkey is a craft tradition; your teacher is your mother, who, as well as passing on her skills to you, inducts you into a whole range of motifs, from which you will never depart, even though no two carpets you make will be precisely the same as hers or even exactly like each other. Being a violinist in a symphony orchestra in the West is to belong to a craft tradition, albeit a more conscious and highly organized one; the day is fast approaching when our society will feel it no longer has any need for symphony orchestras, but we are not quite there yet.

Being a writer is utterly different. Society may pay you for what you produce, but the laws of the marketplace are not the laws of the music academy: there is no sense that all are agreed on what is good and that such agreement rests on a common view of tradition.

Once, of course, writers were called makers, and making poetry, like painting pictures and composing music, was a craft tradition.

Elsewhere in the book, Josipovici discusses thinkers like Schiller and Wittgenstein, who had difficulty with Shakespeare. Where the passing from consensus to authority (again, as exemplified in the dying away of the trial by ordeal) represents a loss of trust in traditional community values (or maybe occurred because that loss was already under way), by the time of Schiller and, later, Wittgenstein that loss is being keenly felt. Josipovici discusses this idea at length with respect to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and Kafka and Beckett, and others (indeed, it is the central concern of the book), but for here the focus is on Shakespeare. Schiller struggles with Shakespeare and sees him as a "naïve artist". Wittgenstein has difficulty understanding Shakespeare as a "great artist" because for him great artists are Romantic, tortured geniuses like Beethoven. Josipovici quotes from Wittgenstein's Culture and Value:

'"Beethoven’s great heart"--nobody could speak of "Shakespeare’s great heart"', he writes. 'I do not think Shakespeare would have been able to reflect on "the lot of the poet". Nor could he regard himself as a prophet or as a teacher of mankind. People stare at him in wonderment, almost as at as spectacular natural phenomenon.'

We have some difficulty with Shakespeare ourselves. Why else the all-too-common need to assign his plays to someone else, someone more suitable? As Josipovici notes, the image of Shakespeare as the "untutored child of nature" goes back beyond Schiller to at least Ben Jonson, with the publication of the First Folio. We don't like this image, but instead we try to explain him away. We have limited imaginations and too many of us are depressingly literal about art, so we try to find some other historical figure with the kinds of experience we think would be necessary to produce these plays. Class-based prejudices still tempt many of us into believing that the plays must have been written by an aristocrat. I suspect that we also want to force Shakespeare into our still Romantic notions of what great artists are. But Josipovici suggests that we can understand Shakespeare more if we replace the word "nature" with the word "craft":

Shakespeare . . . was firmly embedded in a craft tradition of the kind I described in my Introduction: an artist whose mind was stocked with examples both linguistic and existential from the tradition, and who thought of himself as a maker, not a thinker, a craftsman whose primary allegiance was to the production of a play on time and for a particular occasion.

Shakespeare was embedded in a craft tradition, but it's a tradition that is already on the wane. He is able to recognize this, in his art. This is why Josipovici sees these early scenes in Richard II as the turning point in Shakespeare's career. In these scenes, he quickly and effortlessly invokes a tradition, then has Richard ignore it, after which Richard's rule not only grows more arbitrary, but increasingly he is only acting the part of king, since his rule--his word--no longer has any value. It is as if, in this way, Shakespeare discovers his subject, making his plays "out of the ambiguous nature of play" (how often, in Shakespeare, do we see plays within plays?) and exploring "the breakdown of trust and the corrosive effects of suspicion". Josipovici sees Shakespeare as remarkable for being able to do this, while still trusting completely in the tradition in which he was working.

Later writers, from the Romantics on, aren't so fortunate, and the rest of On Trust deals with a lineage of writers who are aware of these concerns. All of which I find endlessly fascinating, but I want to stress how much I appreciate his work just as much for the light he shines on other aspects of our lives. How do we, artists or not, act when we can no longer completely trust in the traditions we have inherited? How can art be seen as more than mere escapism or entertainment, but a necessary component of our lives?

This has been a long post, but as you can see, I'm really just getting started.

Related: Smoothness of Surface; review of Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations.